Quote:Once pristine, once navigable by steamwheelers running upstream as far as Brantford, once subject for 19th-century landscape artist Homer Watson’s bucolic The Flood Gate that hangs in the National Gallery, the Grand River was for decades so abused by waste and industrial pollution that, in 1937, Maclean’s magazine described it as “an open sewer” downstream from Kitchener and Waterloo.

In a report presented at the first annual convention of the Canadian Institute on Sewage and Sanitation, held in Toronto on Oct. 18, 1934, it was said that the industrial waste from two abattoirs, three tire and rubber factories, three tanneries, a glue factory and a dye works “make the Kitchener sewage the strongest known in Canada.”

And yet this late-fall day in 2015, with the fog lifting, there are other canoeists on the Grand, and flyfishers after the brown trout that today thrive in the river below Kitchener. There are ducks and osprey and, suddenly, an eagle swoops over the shoreline willows, down close to the water and away again with our breath...